Presentación de Resultados

South Africa witnessed some significant studies on language and mathematics education. Langa (2006) argued for the use of the home language to support mathematics learning. The limitation of this strategy, however, was that it put the educator who was a non-speaker of the learners’ language at a disadvantage. It also underscored the complexity of the issue of the medium of instruction in South Africa’s multi-lingual situation in general. Sepeng’s (2010) study of the relationship between isiXhosa and English revealed that although English was the language of learning and teaching, the majority of learners actually preferred code-switching between English and isiXhosa for the teaching and learning of Mathematics. There were, however, some positive observations on the relationship between the first and second language. Archibald (2006) made two interesting observations on the effects of the second language (L2) on the first language (L1): the exposure to a second language could enhance the complexity of the first-language syntax used, language use skills (narrative strategies, reading and writing skills) in the first language and non-linguistic skills, attitude towards others, mathematics scores and skills. The second was that acquiring knowledge in the second language did not impede the ability to access that knowledge in the second language. From this perspective, it could be deduced that learners who have minimal proficiency in either L1 or L2 were at the risk of cognitive deficiencies. This observation was interesting in that it sheds a positive light on both the first and second language thereby suggesting their complementarities. Rather than view the other negatively, they could actually be used in mutually beneficial ways in the teaching and learning of Mathematics.

There has been a considerable amount of research on language competency and mathematics education in recent years. Setati (2008) contributed significantly to these studies in South Africa. In mathematics education and language: policy, research, and practice in multilingual contexts, Setati (2004) explored the relationship between language and mathematics education in multilingual classrooms using data collected through interviews with mathematics teachers and learners. The

30 study focused on South Africa based on the recognition of the country as “one of the most complex multilingual countries in the world”. The study also outlined that both teachers and learners recognised English language competency as critical for successful learning of mathematics and actually expressed a preference for learning and teaching mathematics in English. This study further noted that the language preference by the teachers and students was not necessarily driven by “pedagogical or curriculum factors”, but economic, political and ideological ones.

In a related study, Essien and Setati (2007) investigated how the improvement of the learners’ English language proficiency enabled or constrained the development of their mathematical proficiency (2007: 217). There were two major findings here. The first was that “any attempt to improve the language proficiency of the learners with the aim of improving academic proficiency should be done in such a way as to develop concurrently both the basic interpersonal communicative skills and the cognitive academic language proficiency”. The second was that “proficiency in the language of instruction (English) is an important index in mathematics proficiency, but the improvement of learners’ language proficiency, even though important for achievement in mathematics, could not be sufficient to impact on classroom interaction” (Setati et al, 2007:217). Rather than viewing the home languages as an impediment to mathematics learning and teaching, they could actually be deployed as resources in mathematics education by translating mathematics tasks into these languages (Kazima 2007). The author reported that this approach has been successful been adopted in Tanzania, Nigeria and Malawi. This entailed, according to Setati (2008) “the deliberate, proactive and strategic use of the learners’ main languages and the selection of real life, interesting and high cognitive demand tasks”. However, this strategy would run into serious challenges where the teachers spoke or knew a different home language from learners’ home language(s) as argued (Langa, 2006).

In another study, Setati (2008) came up with the interesting finding that “learners, who position themselves in relation to mathematics and so epistemological access, support the use of their home languages as languages of learning and teaching”. This is unlike those teachers and learners who positioned themselves in relation to English and whose concern is, therefore, access to social goods occasioned by the social and economic power of English. This clearly placed language as a factor in the learning and teaching of mathematics in a bilingual/multilingual context such as South Africa. A study by Gerber, Engelbrecht, and Harding (2005) of undergraduate mathematics students’ performance revealed the significant influence that was played by language. They noted the difficulty of understanding abstract concepts and ideas in mathematics even when taught in the

31 student’s first language. For the majority of South African learners, this problem is compounded by the need for learners to master the concepts and ideas through a second language. Gerber et al. (2005:3) found that in South Africa, Afrikaans learners who attended Afrikaans lectures outperformed Afrikaans learners who attended English lectures. This finding showed that in a bilingual/multilingual environment, choice of the language of instruction and linguistic strategies was important in enhancing learner performance up to university level.

Similar studies undertaken beyond the South African borders also found a strong correlation between language proficiency and Mathematics performance. In a study on Latino secondary school youths, Mosqueda (2010) found that non-native English speakers who had good proficiency in English achieved higher performance scores in Mathematics than their counterparts who were native English speakers.

While most writers tended to talk in terms of general language proficiency, Hammil (2010) clearly described, defined and explained the verbal component of a mathematics text as almost always multi-modal containing text, symbolic notation, and graphics. The language of mathematics was precise and technical, the diagrams and graphs made extensive use of implicit conventions, and mathematical notation was information dense, often nonlinear, and could occupy a cognitive space somewhere between text and graphics. It would appear that general language proficiency, though not enough by itself placed a learner in a better position to acquire and develop mathematical language. On the other hand, those learners who have a weak language background would probably find it difficult to cope with mathematical language. Wiest (2003) described the literacy factors that influenced comprehension of mathematical text such as the form and style of reading material, the purpose of reading, which determined how they read it. Wiest (2003) also argued that despite having a reasonably good proficiency, a second language speaker of English faced the challenge that mathematical expressions did not always directly translate into other languages.